white man's burden
white man's burden noun: the supposed responsibility of European people to govern and care for their colonial subjects.
Noun
white man's burden
- The supposed responsibility of European people to govern and care for their colonial subjects.
- Uncle Sam has found his box of tricks heavy, and is having a whiff before going on with his white man's burden to the end.1902 January 2, The Evening Telegraph, Charters Towers, page 3, column 2
- Germany's appearance as a colonizing power in Africa was greeted in no unfriendly spirit by either France or Great Britain. Each of the latter felt that it was already possessed of about all it could comfortably look after, and both realized that another shoulder under "The White Man's Burden" in...1915 October 6, Lewis Ransome Freeman, “Germany's Exit From Africa”, in The World's Work, volume XXX
Origin of white man's burden
From the poem The White Man's Burden (published 1899) by Rudyard Kipling.
Questions about white man's burden
- What does white man's burden mean?
- White man's burden means the supposed responsibility of European people to govern and care for their colonial subjects.
- What part of speech is white man's burden?
- White man's burden is a noun.
Words near white man's burden in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: white man's burden (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “white man's burden.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/white_man%27s_burden. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.